Exploring St. Paul's past through the pages of the Pioneer Press.

Early on the foggy morning of Oct. 15, 1912, Lyman Tibbetts heard a train approaching the swing bridge he tended over the Mississippi River just south of St. Paul.

The bridge was open to allow a steamboat to make its way downriver, so Tibbetts blew his whistle to warn the oncoming train. But Engine No. 10 of the St. Paul Bridge and Terminal Railway Co. continued to chug toward the gaping bridge span.

Tibbetts looked on as Engine No. 10 “leaped ten feet beyond the end of the trestle and then dropped on its nose into the river” more than 25 feet below, dragging eight carloads of sheep, hogs and cattle down with it, according to coverage in that day’s St. Paul Dispatch.

Charles C. Cramer, the train’s engineer, was killed. His body was not recovered until the next afternoon. Fireman Frank Weber and switchman James Garvin both suffered serious head injuries — neither had any memory of the crash.

News of the wreck shared front-page billing in St. Paul’s afternoon newspapers that day with coverage of the attempted assassination of former president Theodore Roosevelt and Game 7 of the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Giants.

The Dispatch and Pioneer Press carried photos of the mangled train hanging from the bridge.

Engine No. 10 was on its way from the Hoffman Avenue Yards in St. Paul to the South St. Paul stockyards across the river about 6:40 a.m. when it crashed, the Dispatch reported.

Switchman Edward Marschinke and the conductor were aboard the caboose, which broke loose with eight other cars in the crash.

“The fog was so dense, we couldn’t see out the window,” Marschinke told the St. Paul Daily News.

The Pioneer Press speculated that the fog caused Cramer to misjudge the distance between his locomotive and the end of the trestle.

Bridgetender Tibbetts told the Dispatch he blew a short blast with his steam whistle — the signal for danger — when he first heard the train.

“Thinking he had heard my whistle, I walked out beside my coop, and stood looking in the direction of the approaching train, when suddenly I saw it leap out of the thick bank of fog and drop into the river,” Tibbetts said.

The Daily News estimated the depth of the frigid river at 5 to 8 feet.

“The cracking and splitting of timbers, mingled with the cries of the penned-in animals, was horrible,” Tibbetts told the Dispatch. The wailing animals were heard by South St. Paul residents a half mile away.

About 300 animals were crushed or drowned, and agents of the Humane Society would spend the next afternoon euthanizing maimed livestock.

William McGivney, president of the South St. Paul Union Stockyards, estimated his company’s losses at $16,000 — more than $385,000 today.

Efforts began almost immediately after the wreck to recover Cramer’s body and surviving livestock, although rescuers were initially hampered by the fog.

Cramer’s widow, Willa, received $4,500 — about 2½ years’ wages — from the St. Paul Bridge and Terminal Railway Co., according to a 2003 article in Ramsey County History magazine. Of this, $1,250 was paid to her attorney, Pierce Butler.

A few months before construction of the Metrodome began in December 1979, former Pioneer Press columnist Don Del Fiacco dined with baseball legend Yogi Berra, who died yesterday at age 90.

“You don’t need no dome,” Berra counseled, adding that football and baseball should be played in separate stadiums. “Let football take care of itself.”

As a coach for the New York Yankees, Berra was in town for a two-game series against the Twins. And to eat. His fare at Mangini’s Restaurante on St. Paul’s East Side included pasta with clam sauce, veal picata and “an inch-thick slab of prime rib.”

Wrote Del Fiacco: “The former manager of the Yankees and New York Mets grew drowsy from vodka, wine and an after-dinner liqueur. ‘We gotta go. Gotta get back to my hotel room — chew some tobacco.’ ”

The underdog Minnesota Vikings surprised all but their most optimistic fans in their NFL debut, beating the Chicago Bears 37-13 on Sept. 17, 1961.

The Bears — who had trounced the Vikings 30-7 in a preseason game just two weeks earlier — were 10-point favorites in the match-up, but rookie quarterback Fran Tarkenton carried Minnesota to victory.

Tarkenton, who entered the game late in the first quarter, completed 17 of 23 passes for 250 yards and four touchdowns that Sunday afternoon at Metropolitan Stadium. He ran in a fifth touchdown himself.

But Twin Cities football fans couldn’t watch their team’s first win on television. The only professional football game televised in this market that day was the Oakland Raiders vs. the San Diego Chargers on KMSP, according to TV listings in that day’s Pioneer Press.

Only the 32,236 people in the stands at the Met were able to watch the Vikings victory. Everyone else had to listen to the game on WCCO Radio. And, judging by a handful of man-on-the-street interviews in the next day’s Pioneer Press, many did.

St. Paul cab driver Russ Finke “heard little else from his customers late Sunday afternoon and evening,” the newspaper reported.

“It’s a good thing for the town, for the whole state,” Finke told a reporter. “Can you imagine the crowd they’re going to have out there the next time they play?”

Even Bears Coach George Halas, who had called the game “a toss-up” the day before, confessed to being impressed by the rout.

“Of course we knew the Vikings were a good football team but we didn’t expect this,” Halas told reporters. “They’re not amateurs, they’re football players.”

The win against a divisional rival rocketed the Vikings to the No. 1 spot in the Western Division standings — but they didn’t stay there long. Following their blowout victory against the Bears, the team embarked upon a seven-game losing streak and won only two more games that season.

These special editions, produced outside the normal publishing schedule and focused on a single breaking news event, were all but obsolete in the era of TV and radio. But on Sept. 11, the Pioneer Press printed two of them.

The first extra was primarily national coverage of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., from the Associated Press and the Washington Post. An article by Pioneer Press reporter Jim Ragsdale detailed security measures being implemented at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul.

The photo at the top of this post, shot by Pioneer Press photographer Scott Cohen, also ran in the second extra. A stunned crowd had gathered at G&H Food Market in downtown St. Paul to watch live television coverage of the attacks.

Theodore Roosevelt may have spoken too softly at the Minnesota State Fair when he first delivered publicly the line that would come to define his foreign policy as president of the United States.

Its significance seems to have been lost on the local press.

“A good many of you are probably acquainted with the old proverb: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick — you will go far,’ ” Roosevelt said in a speech at the Grandstand on Sept. 2, 1901. “If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power.”

“Laughter and applause were mingled throughout his address in equal proportions,” the Pioneer Press reported.

But the paper made no mention of the iconic line in its rapturous coverage of then-Vice President Roosevelt’s visit, except in a transcription of his speech on an inside page.

The St. Paul Globe even put together an abridged version of the address for its lazier readers, highlighting Roosevelt’s “gems of thought.” The “big stick” line was not included.

Just four days after Roosevelt’s speech at the State Fair, President William McKinley was shot by an assassin in Buffalo, N.Y. When McKinley died a week later, Roosevelt assumed the presidency. And he brought his fondness for “Big Stick Diplomacy” with him.

The phrase became so strongly associated with Roosevelt during his presidency that he was often depicted in political cartoons carrying a big stick.

While his State Fair speech was Roosevelt’s first public use of the famous line, a January 1900 letter Roosevelt wrote when he was governor of New York is believed to be his first recorded use of the phrase, according to the Library of Congress.

In their three tours of the United States, the Beatles made only one stop in the Twin Cities.

It was Aug. 21, 1965, and if they read the Pioneer Press’ coverage of their performance at Bloomington’s Metropolitan Stadium, one can hardly blame them for not coming back.

Reporter Donald Del Fiacco openly mocked the Fab Four and their fans in his article about the band’s arrival that afternoon at Wold-Chamberlain Field (now called Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport).

“The Twin Cities area was visited Saturday by some strange citizens of another world,” he wrote on the front page of the next day’s paper. “They wore long hair and wide grins and were easily identified as Ringo Starr, John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney. They were the Beatles — alleged musicians.”

When the group landed, Del Fiacco wrote, they were greeted by 4,000 “crazed” teenagers who turned the airport into “Shrieksville, U.S.A.” And he put sneering quotation marks around the word “concert” when he referred to that night’s performance at Met Stadium.

On page 2, Ralph Ingerson reported that “for 35 minutes the whole stadium full of teenage girls were on one wild emotional jag.”

“The stadium’s PA system was tuned up to the last watt, and occasionally a snatch of Beatle-made music filtered past the first row of fans,” Ingerson wrote.

An unbylined article three days later quoted a local law enforcement official saying “the Beatles were the worst people I have ever seen visit the city.”

Minneapolis Police Inspector Donald Dwyer claimed to have chased more than 10 teenage girls out of the band’s downtown hotel rooms. He told the Pioneer Press they’d been “coaxed” upstairs by the Beatles and their entourage.

“These are not the kind of people I’d like to have the kids of Minneapolis look up to as idols,” Dwyer said of the group. “They just don’t have much going for them.”

Bill Diehl, a St. Paul Dispatch columnist who took the stage at Met Stadium before the concert to introduce the Beatles, appears to have been the lone defender of the band and their teenage fans.

“As master of ceremonies at the show that night, I was in the stage area … and I can tell you that except for sporadic bursts of screaming, it was hushed out on the stadium field,” Diehl wrote in his “Look ‘n’ Listen” column a couple of days after the concert. “The Beatles later remarked that the Twin Cities crowd was one of the most orderly and silent they had ever played to.”

He called Dwyer’s accusation that the group had lured young girls up to their hotel rooms “a loud laugh.”

“The Minneapolis Police who were on the scene were having a hectic time keeping young female fans AWAY from the hotel,” Diehl wrote.

On the morning of July 15, 1872, residents of downtown St. Paul saw one of their city’s brand new streetcars roll unattended down Fourth Street toward Lowertown on its recently completed track.

Although its first trip wasn’t officially scheduled until 4 p.m., a group of boys had sneaked aboard the car and released its brakes. It came to a rest safely at the Jackson Street intersection.

The runaway car and its twin were hitched up to a team of horses in time to carry a contingent of local dignitaries and newspaper reporters on the line’s maiden voyage, as curious onlookers crowded the sidewalks along the track.

The opening of the 2.5-mile streetcar line — the state’s first — promised to revolutionize daily life in the Saintly City. No longer would its residents have to rely on their own two feet to get from one end of town to the other.

“Walking is played out!” the Saint Paul Pioneer proudly declared the day after it opened.

Each car seated 14 passengers, who paid 5 cents apiece for the ride. A round trip, along a circuitous route from what is now the intersection of Lafayette Road and East 7th Street to Grand Avenue and West Seventh Street, probably took about an hour. Aaron Isaacs, co-author of “Twin Cities by Trolley: The Streetcar Era in Minneapolis and St. Paul,” says their average speed was about 5 miles per hour.

A crew of 20 men had begun construction of the line just five weeks earlier. It was funded by a handful of local businessmen who formed the St. Paul City Railway Co., and they were already busy planning an expansion.

Regular service along half the length of the line began the next day, although one of the cars promptly broke down.

The Pioneer cheered the new amenity in its pages.

“It is pleasant to see how naturally our citizens take to the street cars,” the newspaper said. “Each day their popularity increases.”

But it didn’t take long for the line to meet with its first accident. On July 22, 1872, one of the cars collided with a wagon, knocking out the teeth of a young boy who was riding on the back.

Across the river, Minneapolis would open its first streetcar line three years later. The two lines would eventually be brought under the ownership of the Twin City Rapid Transit Co., which replaced the horse-drawn cars with electric ones by 1891, Isaacs said.

The company was ultimately taken over by a group of men with ties to Minneapolis gangster Kid Cann, who dismantled the streetcar system and replaced it with buses in the 1950s.

On the morning of March 28, 1996, Twins center fielder Kirby Puckett woke up with a blind spot in his right eye. After being diagnosed with glaucoma and undergoing several surgeries, 36-year-old Puckett announced his retirement from Major League Baseball on July 12. He ended his 12-year career with a .318 batting average, 2,304 hits and 1,085 RBIs, according to MNopedia.

On July 9, 1932, railroad workers at St. Paul’s Union Depot were surprised to find that a tiny wooden shack had popped up in the middle of their rail yard.

It belonged to St. Paul resident Carl F. Hirte, a self-described “homesteader” who had discovered that a 5-acre tract of land amid the tangle of tracks had never been legally transferred to the railroad companies that occupied it — or so he thought.

After filing a claim with the local U.S. Government Land Office on Jan. 9, Hirte threw together his one-room shanty just in time to meet the 6-month deadline to establish a residence at the site under the Homestead Act of 1862.

It wasn’t a desirable address. A story in the July 10 edition of the Pioneer Press described the property as an island, surrounded by “smoke-begrimed” freight cars.

“A paved roadway over which scores of trucks pass daily to load and unload freight runs nearly to the door of the shack, and high above it and behind it runs elevated trackage on which long freight and passenger cars thunder day and night,” the article said.

Still, Hirte’s attorney, G.W. Young, estimated the parcel’s value at $1 million, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Presumably, Hirte’s angle was to sell the land to the railroad interests after establishing ownership.

He wasn’t the first to lay claim to the diamond-shaped piece of real estate, which was about 450 feet long and 200 feet across at its widest point. A man named Thomas Masterman had staked a claim there in 1861, but was denied the title to the land by the federal government.

Young contended that, because no formal title was ever granted on the parcel, it was open for settlement.

But the government disagreed. After appealing an initial denial of his claim, Hirte was finally forced by the Department of the Interior to vacate his shack the following December.